From Kalyn-A New Adventure

Whew....this is the longest I have written without pictures. Sorry there are no pictures for this post but I still hope you will enjoy it.


Believe me when I say I did not intend for this to happen. But God does not go by what I think or by what I feel. So this morning I was being a good little girl and doing school like I should be. I picked up this book that Mamma bought me for school and it looked rather boring and not really very interesting so I was not excited to start reading it. Reluctantly I picked it up and started to read the preface and boy did I get a surprise! The book that so surprised me is The Bible Jesus Read by Philip Yancey. It goes through Philip Yancey's journey of discovering the Old Testament and how it is a big part of the Bible. Unfortunately, as Christians we tend to lean more to the New Testament and pretty much ignore the Old.

"The knowledge of the Old Testament is fading fast among Christians and has virtually vanished in popular culture. In a comedy routine Jay Leno tested his audience's knowledge of the Bible by asking them to name one of the Ten Commandments. A hand shot up; "God helps those who help themselves?" Everybody laughed, but no one else could do better. Polls show that eighty percent of Americans claim to believe in the Ten Commandments, but very few can name many as four of them. Half of all adult Americans cannot identify the Bible's first book as Genesis. And fourteen percent identify Joan of Arc as Noah's wife.
More surprisingly, a Wheaten Collage professor named Gary Burge has found that ignorance of the Old Testament extends to the church as well. For several years Burge has been testing incoming freshmen at his school, a premier evangelical institution. His surveys show that students who have attended Sunday School all their lives, have watched innumerable episodes of Veggie Tales, and have listened to countless sermons, cannot identify basic facts about the Old Testament."
-Philip Yancey


Now this I must admit is not much of a shock, sadly. It makes me very sad to think that we are missing out on some of the most amazing and thoughtfully deep parts of the Bible because they make us uncomfortable or we just don't understand them. Now there are those few stories that we take from it like the story of Moses or Jonah and David or the Psalms and the Proverbs. But let's just be honest, we have not learned how to love or to search through it for the truths of Gods love toward a very stiff necked people. But are not we all stiff necked? Maybe we don't pass over most of the Old Testament intentionally, but we do it. And we are missing out on part of the story.

So what am I going to do about it? Well I have opened up my Bible to Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 and I am going to start reading it all the way through Malachi.

Thomas Merton said,

"There is, in a word nothing comfortable about the Bible-until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves…Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it? Have we ceased to fight it? Then perhaps our reading is no longer serious.

For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meanings that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself….

Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished at it, just because we have learned not to have problems with it."

And so that is why I am not just reading through it; I am going to in my notebook start a new area call My Study of the Old Testament. I am going to start writing my own side notes and writing down my own discoveries from the Old Testament. I have to admit I am not really looking forward to the first seven books of the Bible but I am going to do this and maybe I will find something in there for me.

I will be posting about my journey through the Old Testament and I hope that I can give others the motivation to also dig in and start exploring the Old Testament on their own.